Is the generation of his Son God’s sole act, and does it consummate with its fecundity all his beatitude?
In God, from the co-eternal regard interchanged between the Father and the Son, springs a third term of relation, proceeding from the one and the other, really distinct from them, raised by the force of the infinite to personality, which is the Holy Spirit, the holy, the unfathomable and stainless movement of divine love. As the Son exhausts knowledge, the Holy Spirit exhausts love in God, and by him the cycle of divine fecundity and life closes. As a perfect spirit God thinks and loves; he produces a thought equal to himself, and with his thought a love equal to both. Everything in nature teaches you that being and activity are one and the same, that activity is expressed by action, and that action is necessarily productive or fruitful; that the end of fecundity is to establish relations between similar beings; that relation is unity in plurality, from which results life, beauty, and goodness. And that God, the infinite being, the pre-eminently good, beautiful and living being is infallibly the most magnificent totality of relations, perfect unity and perfect plurality, the unity of substance in the plurality of persons; a primordial mind [the Father], a thought equal to the mind [the Word/Son] that engenders it, a love [the Holy Spirit] equal to the mind and the thought from which it proceeds; all the three, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, ancient as eternity, great as infinity, one in beatitude as in substance from which they derive their identical divinity.
If human society would aspire to perfection, it has no other model to study and to imitate. It will find there the first social constitution in the first community; equality of nature between the persons who compose it; order in their equality, since the Father is the principle of the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; unity, the cause of plurality; thought, receiving from above its being and its light; love, terminating and crowning all the relations. If human society would aspire to perfection, it has no other model to study and to imitate. It will find there the first social constitution in the first community; equality of nature between the persons who compose it; order in their equality, since the Father is the principle of the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; unity, the cause of plurality; thought, receiving from above its being and its light; love, terminating and crowning all the relations.
This concludes my series about Père Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of the Holy Trinity. My next two posts will review why the works of mercy are an excellent form of active Trinitarian spirituality.
